Web Design & Development

About CS: markITwrite CS: TeamStats

Using Web Design, Digital Media and Digital Channels to inspire your customers, market your business and bring your campaigns to life in the most cost effective and creative way.

Design for the web encompasses so much more than just website design these days. Have you told all of your customers about that special offer you have on yet? Do you know where and how people are finding your website? Would it be easier to explain to your customers what you do using a video? Do you feel like your print advertising budgets are just money down the drain?

We can help you with any of the above and more. Using digital media and digital channels to market your business is an incredibly cost effective way of getting in front of your target audience. We have years of experience in designing websites and using digital media to your advantage.

Our web and digital marketing services include:

Website Design
Content managed websites
HTML email campaigns
SMS campaigns
Video filming & production
Google AdWords campaigns

FLASH microsites
Event/conference websites
Search Engine Optimisation
Website analytics
Social Network Profile Design

Have a browse through our portfolio for recent examples of our Web work or go to the case study tabs on this page for a more in-depth look at projects we have delivered for our clients.

Harrington McDermott were a real pleasure to work with and gave us confidence at every step that we could reach our goals; and we did!

- Tom Stanbury, TeamStats.net

We have had an amazing few days at ExCeL and launched the brand in true style with fantastic audience reactions and visitor feedback. None of this would have been possible without you!

- Amanda Drury, EquiCirque.com

About markITwrite

A digital copywriting agency providing a range of content marketing services for businesses who want to boost their web presence in a competitive online marketplace. They provide a full scope of writing services and online marketing solutions, including: blogs, niche articles, white papers, press releases, script evaluation, proofreading, and social media management, all specialising for technology and social media.

The Brief

A redesign of the markITwrite website based on a premium theme, including updating and optimising of the existing WordPress installation. Review and tightening of the sites security and optimising the site’s titles and descriptions for chosen keywords and key phrases. Implementation of a more pleasant alternative to the “smoother slider” previously used for promoting services, and smarter integration and distribution of ‘Social Share’ buttons and calls to action.

The solution

Establishing the key areas to improve upon were vital in the early stages of prototyping. Discussion in-house and with the client confirmed what were the primary features and after a few iteraions of wireframing the design was developed. The design wa then tweaked and neatened before being finalised and agreed upon.

The ability to customise WordPress themes is one of the systems greatest strengths, however, when wider reaching and larger changes need to be made challenges arise. Hacking about at themes innards to get them to do what you want is a challenging task at the best of times, even more so when it’s not your code that you’re working around. It becomes exponentially difficult to iterate on a framework that was not designed for the purpose that is required. For this reason then, it was suitable to start a-fresh.

"The guys at Harrington McDermott were excellent to work with on the redevelopment of our website. Not only are they friendly and approachable, but they go out of their way to ensure that the needs of the customer is met. I would fully recommend working with them and wouldn’t hesitate to use them again."

- Kerry Butters, markITwrite

Using a custom-built framework, the site was coded into HTML/CSS and provided to the client to test and agree upon the funcitionality before WordPress was implemented. Once all of the required aspects were in place, security and SEO were addressed. With the site coded and finalised, the site was placed under maintenance as the new theme was installed and customised, and articles and pages were updated before being put live and shown off to the world.

TeamStats.net

TeamStats provides free team websites for use by all amateur football teams and players. Each football team website is bursting with superb features to assist and improve the management, organisation and administration of amateur football teams. Teamstats also brings teams closer together by offering a simple yet powerful communication system so managers can make contact with their teams in seconds using SMS texts and emails.

TeamStats.net allows you to:

Manage your football team online
Analyse your teams perfomances
Connect easily with your players
Socialise and build team spirit
All for free.

Project Requirement

TeamStats.net is a very powerful team management system and was doing incredibly well with a constant stream of new teams registering. However, the site had grown organically over a number of years without any real design management. So TeamStats wanted to modernise the design of the site and bring the back-end and front-end designs into alignment and make the whole site experience more consistent, professional and more appealing to a wider range of teams. Also, TeamStats was doing very well in the UK but they wanted to spread their wings and encourage sign-ups from more international teams.

As well as looking internationally, the team at TeamStats have aspirations of growing into other sports and sporting networks and have already received significant business interest. So, Harrington McDermott needed to come up with a design that was both scalable and easily re-branded or repositioned without affecting functionality.

Another factor of our brief was that the TeamStats.net service is completely free and supported by ad revenue. So we were asked to advise on how more ads could be served and ad revenue be driven up without spoiling the user experience.

The Solution

Harrington McDermott worked with TeamStats from concept to completion on the redesign of the site. They already had a great team of developers in-house but needed marketing consultancy and assistance with the graphic design and user-experience.

We began by auditing the existing site and feeding back our results, then using them to brainstorm ideas for increased site functionality and feature improvements.

The team sites you get once registered with TeamStats are bursting with features to assist and improve the management, organisation and administration of the teams that use it, providing an online network to players, parents, and supporters - keeping them informed of matches, results and other important team information. All of these features had been added individually over time and all differed slightly in their presentation. Plus, now we had suggested a number of new features to add into the mix.

So our first design conundrum was that we had to produce a homepage design that communicates all of these (existing and new) features efficiently on the home page, directing existing users to the content they require and new users to conversion. We did this by designing a large feature slider area above the fold, where custom HTML can be placed. This enables the TeamStats development team to regularly create and update highly visual, engaging and searchable content for the slides.

We then made sure our design concepts could be applied and worked across all features of the site and that design elements were consistently applied to buttons, headings, call-out boxes etc. Our designs make it easier for users to drill down into their stats and get the information they are looking for.

Footballers tend to be very patriotic and loyal to their strip. So, we also designed customisation techniques into the team site so that users could customise their team pages by adding their badges, photos, team strips and change the background and interface colours of their site too so they match their team colours.

The Results

Thousands of teams now use and love the TeamStats system and registrations have increased since the launch of the new site. Even better is that TeamStats.net now has teams registered from 85 different countries and continues to go from strength-to-strength.